Cultural Exchange Visas

Trump Administration Considering Cuts to Cultural Exchange Visas

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is considering major reductions in cultural exchange programs, including those for au pairs and summer workers, that allow young people from foreign countries to work in the U.S., people familiar with the administration’s planning said.

President Donald Trump’s “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, issued in April, calls for a review of U.S. immigration rules to ensure that the interests of domestic workers are protected. No decisions have been made, but supporters of the program worry changes will be made without a full public debate.

A White House-led interagency working group is particularly focused on five employment-based programs that are part of the J-1 visa exchange visitor program, according to people familiar with the discussion.

“The administration has concerns” about all of the visas that allow for guest workers, said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which wants to limit legal and illegal immigration. “But there are particular programs that need more attention because of their size, their effect on the U.S. labor market, and because a significant number of people overstay their visas.”

People familiar with the conversations said the review includes the summer work-travel program, which brings more than 100,000 students to the U.S. each summer, often stationed in tourist destinations such as beach resorts and national parks. It also includes the smaller au pair program, through which foreigners live in American homes and provide child care as well as take classes and participate in intercultural exchanges with their host families. Other programs under discussion include those for camp counselors, interns and trainees.

Legacies of Racism in immigration

How Legacies of Racism Persist in U.S. Immigration Policy

The United States has always been a nation of immigrants, but for most of its history U.S. law treated newcomers differently according to race.

Between 1790 and 1952, legislators restricted naturalization – the process by which immigrants become citizens – to particular racial and ethnic groups, with a consistent preference for whites from northwestern Europe. Laws restricted black immigration beginning in 1803, and a series of subsequent measures banned most Asians and limited access by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The U.S. example proved contagious, as our research shows, because every country in the Western Hemisphere followed the U.S. practice of discriminating against certain immigrants by race and ethnicity.

By now, all countries in the New World have eliminated and repudiated legal provisions aimed against particular racial categories – but discrimination continues in more subtle forms.

In the United States, reforms in 1965 ended the system of assigning different immigration quotas for each nationality in ways that favored northwestern Europeans. In addition, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution in 2011 symbolically repudiating anti-Asian measures such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act (which had been legally rescinded in 1943) as “incompatible with the basic founding principles recognized in the Declaration of Independence that all persons are created equal” and “incompatible with the spirit of the United States Constitution.” Formally, therefore, U.S. immigration law is no longer based on ethno-racial criteria and real changes in immigration practices have greatly diversified the racial and ethnic make-up of the United States over the past half century.

Yet current U.S. immigration law retains subtle provisions reprising earlier efforts to privilege certain kinds of new arrivals and block others. Our research pinpoints these persistent legacies of discrimination and shows how they work to favor traditionally advantaged groups.

Immigrant Children in court

The Fight for Appointed Counsel for Immigrant Children Continues

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument on Tuesday in C.J.L.G. v. Sessions – a case that raises grave due process concerns for indigent immigrant children. At issue is whether an immigrant child in deportation proceedings has a right to an appointed attorney when he cannot afford to hire one himself.

For years, groups have been fighting for the right of indigent immigrant children to appointed attorneys when in deportation proceedings. However, this fight was dealt a major setback in September 2016, when the Ninth Circuit ruled in another case, F.L.B. v. Sessions, that immigrant children suing for this right could not bring a class action lawsuit in federal court.

The Ninth Circuit said that children must bring the claim on an individual basis. The court urged the government to work with the attorneys involved in the F.L.B. v. Sessions case to identify potential “test cases” through which the claim could be brought before the Court. C.J.L.G. v. Sessions represents the first such case.

C.J.L.G. is a Honduran minor who, after being abandoned by his father, fled his native land with his mother at the age of 10 after a gang tried to forcibly recruit him, including threatening him at gunpoint. After arriving in the United States, he was detained by immigration agents and placed into deportation proceedings.

In these proceedings, C.J.L.G. sought asylum based on his experiences in Honduras. But because he and his mother could not afford an attorney, C.J.L.G. was forced to defend himself under the immigration laws – often referred to as the second most complex set of laws after the tax code – without an attorney. After a series of court proceedings he did not understand, an immigration judge ordered him deported.

During oral argument, the attorney arguing C.J.L.G.’s case before the Ninth Circuit, Ahilan Arulanatham of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, explained that in no other area of law besides immigration are children forced to defend themselves against trained prosecutors.

AB-638

Con la eliminacion del programa de consultores de inmigracion AB-638
Pagan justos por pecadores?

Sabe usted que es un consultor de inmigracion?

Un consultor de inmigracion es una persona que le ayuda a llenar formularios de inmigracion
a inmigrantes que buscan un remedio migratorio, sin tener la autorizacion federal para brindar asesoria o consejos de inmigracion -

como es eso? - son conultores y no pueden dar consultoria?

Asi, es. Estas contradicciones de termino, han dado origen a que muchos
inmigrantes busquen a los consultores para resolver sus problemas de inmigracion,
dando lugar a que algunos de estos, le hayan cometido errores en sus tramites
los cuales son detectados años mas tarde, tal vez cuando estan listos para ser deportados
dice el director de CARECEN, Daniel Sharp.

En el condado de los angeles se reportan aproximadamente 100 quejas al año
de consultores de inmigracion segun el sitio de internet - observatoriocolef.org

Como se originan los consultores de inmigracion?

los consultores de inmigracion se originan con la amnistia migratoria
de 1986 bajo la administracion del presidente ronald reagan, para
ayudar a resolver los tramites de 2.7 millones de inmigrantes